John Lutz: Snakes, Mice And Fear on a Plane

An eight-year-old boy should never be allowed to watch Night Of The Living Dead. Especially if his bedroom is on the ground floor of a church parsonage surrounded by a forest preserve.

Everything seemed fine at 3 PM on Saturday watching the Son of Svengoolie, Chicago’s local cheesy horror and science fiction TV show. The sun was still out. There were commercial breaks. The movie was in black and white. Nothing feels real when it’s in black and white and it’s daytime. But later that night, when I was alone in my bedroom and darkness had fallen over all the creepy trees in our backyard, it was another story. I knew any minute zombies would come walking out of the haze; they would break through my window and eat my leg. Why didn’t I just ask my mom to get me a window shade?

Thirty years later, I’m not afraid of zombies anymore, something my wife, Sue, tells me is a plus in the husband department. It’s a completely irrational fear. Were I to get semi-scientific I might even say fact: There is no such thing as a zombie. I know that fact, therefore I apply it to my fear and the fear is gone. My question is, “Why can’t I apply that same logic to other things I’m afraid of? Why have some fears gotten worse?”

Okay, I’m going to open up here. This is a safe place, right? I am afraid of mice. I know it’s dumb. I know they are small little creatures that really can’t hurt me, but for some reason they still creep the shit out of me.

A few years back, I had a mouse in my apartment. This was before I was living with my wife. Once again, I was alone and it was dark out. I was going to the bathroom, number 1 if you must know. As my pants were surrounding my ankles, the little bugger darted out from behind the toilet and into the living room. I jumped and screamed like a little girl even though the mouse was the size of a strawberry, and probably every bit as delicious. I was so freaked out that I had to stay at a friend’s apartment that night. Don’t worry, my friends still think I’m pretty tough. They assured me of it as they plugged in a nightlight for me.

I am also afraid of snakes. Living in New York City you really don’t come across too many snakes, unless they escape from the snake zoo. Oh crap, that actually happened. A poisonous Egyptian cobra escaped from the Bronx Zoo last March. Okay, I’m not going to get worked up about this until snakes figure out how to use the subway. And even though I live in a relatively snake free zone, I still have snake dreams. If you don’t know, a snake dream is where the floors are covered in snakes.

This past spring my wife Sue and I visited her parents in Florida. During the day, I saw a snake outside by the garbage cans. I had a minor freak out, but I let everyone know I was ok. I say minor because it was the tiniest of snakes. Later that night, I was given the job of throwing out the trash after dinner. They don’t have lights out by the garbage cans, so I had to get creative. I knew, I just knew that snake was still hanging out there, so I took pictures with my camera to give me quick visuals and also hopefully scare away any legless creatures that might be laying in wait. I didn’t see a snake, but I did get four or five amazing shots of the nighttime trash area. My wife’s family still thinks I’m tough, too.

But my biggest adult fear, besides winding up wandering the streets with a giant beard and 2 shopping carts I call home, is flying. I wasn’t always afraid of flying. When I was a kid I would pretend I was Han Solo in the Millennium Falcon taking off from the planet Tatooine. The feeling of the jet picking up off the ground made my stomach feel weird in a good way. Plus, you got a free glass of Coke! Free pop! Pretending I’m in a space ship! What could be better?

After college, I moved to Chicago in 1996 to study improv and learn to write sketch comedy. After performing around town for five years, the Second City Theater hired me. Second City is the pinnacle of comedy in Chicago. It’s where such amazing performers as John Candy, John Belushi and other non-John-named actors like Tina Fey started their careers. Getting to work at the Second City was the reason I moved to Chicago in the first place. I was proud to be a member of their national touring company. We would travel around the US performing sketch and improv comedy at colleges and performance art centers. It was a dream job.

One thing I never thought about was the fact that we would be flying everywhere. My flying quota went from once or twice a year to ten or twelve times a month. And of course, out of that many flights, one or two of them were going to be stinkers. The worst happened when we were flying to do a show in Austin, Texas.

When we were on our approach, our flight path took us through some of the darkest black clouds I’ve ever seen. The crazy thing was they didn’t fill the entirety of the sky – that would have just looked like night (which, as I’ve mentioned, is already a little scary). But instead, they were more frightening. They were like giant vertical pillars of dark that we had to fly through every five minutes. It would be sunny and clear one second, then pitch black and choppy the next. I remember the only thing that kept me from screaming was that I sitting next to a friend of mine, Sue (not my wife), and I was holding her hand trying to calm her.

As we flew through the black pudding of a cloud, the plane dropped sending my drink and my book floating up into the air for a quick second like they went to Space Camp. Then slam! Everything fell back down into someone else’s chair. My other friends and castmates Tom and Rob were laughing. A person across the aisle from them asked, “Why are you laughing? This is serious!” Tom answered, “Oh we’re not laughing because we think it’s funny. We’re laughing because this is scaring the shit out of us.” Honestly, it’s a good thing that wasn’t totally true, because there was already enough stuff floating in the main cabin as we plummeted. The last thing I needed to see as I faced death was a piece of poop hovering at eye level.

After 25 minutes of terrible ups and downs, we finally landed safe and sound. I usually hate passengers who applaud when you land, but this time I was leading the charge. This flight and other only slightly less scary ones caused me to create an irrational fear of dying in horrible plane accident.

With all these fears, my imagination gets the better of me. I accidentally picture the plane hurtling dramatically into the side of a mountain even when I’m just flying to Chicago. I visualize that mouse, Ramsey (that what I named him), sitting on my chest while I sleep, waiting for the perfect moment to take a dump in my mouth. If I close my eyes in the bathroom, I see a snake coming up through the toilet and biting me on the butthole, which is weird because a hole is a negative space, but I think you get a sense of the area I’m referring to.

Maybe I’m a weirdo. Or perhaps I’m just like everyone else. Mayhaps as adults we all carry some irrational fears with us from childhood.

As an actor and writer, the behavior of other people fascinates me. In fact, it’s my job to know why individuals are motivated to do what they do. It’s also my job to know why I do the things I do. At least that’s what my wife tells me.

Even before college I was interested in the way people work and more specifically how individuals respond to the world. Does everyone count in their heads when going up or down stairs? Do other people have that same urge to jump when they stand on a balcony in a New York high rise just to see what happens? Does everyone think pigs are the funniest animals? I do. Doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. Pigs are the funniest. Glad we solved that one.

I’m fascinated by the fact that flying scares me, but performing in front of 300 people doesn’t. It confounds me that I can take charge of some fears and not others.

Lucky for me, I have a friend who has a Ph.D. in Psychology, Jamil Zaki. The fantastic thing about Jamil is that he lets me take part in some of his psychology studies. He knows I’m interested in them and he likes to see what I get out of the experience. After mentioning some of my fears to him, Jamil had me participate in a psychology study that deals with the exact issues I’ve mentioned above.

I sat in a small room staring at a computer tackling the task of viewing different pictures and grading whether I had a negative reaction to them or not.

Basically, there were two different picture types, social and non-social. The photos on the computer screen ranged from images as benign as a wooden chair or a porch swing to more disturbing images like an adult yelling at a child or a close-up of a king cobra. One photo was a nest of bugs that had overtaken a porch. The next would be plate and a fork. Then the next would be of a group of guys fighting in the street.

I was asked to grade how I felt when I saw the picture on a scale from 1 to 5, 1 being neutral and 5 being very negative.

There was one more wrinkle to the test. Before each image showed up, either the word “CLOSE” or the word “FAR” would appear.

When the word CLOSE appeared, I had been instructed to imagine that I was very close to the object or action of the picture. If it was a snake, I was supposed to believe that snake was right in front of me. How do I feel? Rather negative. I put a five. It didn’t matter that it was just a picture. Where did this snake hate come from? Maybe it started when I watched Indiana Jones as a kid. Odd that most of my life good or bad stems from Harrison Ford movies. Great! Now I’m going to be afraid of both cowboys and aliens! But that’s just because it was a bad movie.

Whenever the word FAR appeared, I was supposed to look at the picture as if I was far away from it, not only in distance, but also in how much I removed myself from the situation. This is sometimes called reappraisal: purposefully changing your emotional reaction to something in the environment. I was told to look at the picture as if I was a reporter and was only to take in the information as facts. Let’s say I saw the same picture of the snake. This time I was to look at it as if I was writing a description. What color is its skin? How long is it? Where is it sitting? I was to detach myself. As if I was a robot, observing it with no emotion. It’s a good thing I’m not afraid of robots. Another attribute my wife says is a plus in the husband department.

This is usually a test for 10-year-olds and young teens, so I thought it would be perfect for me emotionally. However, Jamil informed me that kids usually have much stronger emotional reactions while participating in the test than I did. A “CLOSE” picture that causes a teenager to get existential dread might just be “meh” to me. Tweens and teens don’t only freak out because of bad things like imagined Zombie attacks or breakups. They react more negatively than adults even to standard psychology tests like the one I took. Jamil went on to explain that as we age, our experience of negative emotions diminishes.

The question then is: is this because they have stronger emotional reactions to begin with? Or do adults react just as strongly, but just are better at reappraising? The research of Kevin Ochsner, Ph.D., a professor at Columbia University, suggests that adults are better at reappraisal. Kevin is one of the leading experts on reappraisal and the study I participated in took place in his lab.

So if I’m an adult and so much better at reappraising things, why can’t I do it with snakes, planes and rodents? Which I am aware sounds like a bad Samuel L. Jackson movie.

Kevin explained to me, “Emotions are very idiosyncratic.” Your own personal history affects what you will react to. “There’s going to be some really strong trigger for all of us, and that’s going to be the context in which we’re going to observe the most effort to regulate, it’s going to be the most difficult.”

But what about those unhelpful fears that still linger in me as an adult? Kevin says that just being aware of them can help you tackle the problem. Just knowing you can look at a fear in a different way can help you take charge of it. Look at the facts.

I thought I would try this with one of my fears. Since I have two cats now (adopted through marriage) mice don’t get within a one-mile radius of our apartment and snakes are about as rare as turtles in Manhattan (although I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that my wife and I did see a giant turtle at an animal hospital that someone had found on the subway, and I hate being remiss. Wait a minute, was that turtle learing how to use the subway? If so, snakes can’t be that far behind.) I thought the easiest fear to confront was flying.

The next time I flew, I wrote down my reactions as I was taking off. Here is what I wrote.

“I’m still scared! Every plane sounds different so when I hear a new noise it freaks me out. I’m writing this as we take off and I don’t know if that is helping either.” Even my handwriting looked scared. I almost engraved the seat arm with my fear. Which would be a fun thing for the next flyer to see. AHHHHHH! Help! Trying this exercise made me realize writing about the experience as we took off only made it worse.

Kevin explained to me that when we are in the throes of a strong response if you start to think too much about it, it could actually amplify the emotion. He went on to explain,
“In the moment, it can be really hard to implement these strategies especially initially… but the thing is with practice hopefully it can get easier.”

Then how the heck am I supposed to solve this??? My friend Jamil explained that the most effective way to reappraise something like a fear of flying should be done before you get into the situation at all. You should visualize the take off. As you do this, look at the facts. The pilots are trained professionals and want to fly you as safely as possible. Flying is statistically safer than driving. That whirring sound that you sort of feel in your butt is the wheels going up into the belly of the plane. Try to experience all these thoughts, so when you experience the real deal you can just go back to the facts.

Jamil also issued a warning to not overdo it. He explained, “trying to regulate can be super harmful if it instead turns into rumination, where you fixate on the thing that’s upsetting you.”

The next day, I tried this at home. I thought about the take off. I imagined all of the sights and sounds. I imagined the smell of an airplane, the feeling of lift off. I imagined everything in such a realistic way, I literally made myself anxious and I had to stop. I was doing exactly what Jamil warned me about.

The next time I boarded a plane, however, my anxiety was a lot less than usual. I wasn’t as freaked out as the aircraft left the ground. It wasn’t totally gone, but it was better. There might be something to this reappraisal thing after all.

So many of the most important things psychologists are now learning suggest that it’s up to individuals to learn how to become experts at not just thinking about their emotions, but doing so in very particular ways that will help (and not hurt) them. Psychologists can’t do it for you, and unlike medication, regulation strategies take work. It’s like trying to turn people into experts who can navigate their emotions safely. Dare I say, making them like mind pilots! And if my own mind pilot is flying my plane, I can sit back, relax and enjoy the flight. Because I’m pretty sure pilots are tough. And that’s also what I am.

It’s interesting how easy it is once you talk it out. I am in charge of my own thoughts. I just need to look at the facts, like I do with Zombies. It’s just a rat on the subway platform. With his little rat teeth and little rat claws and stinky rat tail and mangy rat hair and chunky rat belly. I bet he eats fingers or, more likely, toes. He can probably even eat a toe through a shoe. And don’t forget about all the diseases he is carrying. Okay, not doing the best job on this one right now.

I guess it’s just going to take practice. I need to consciously reappraise the situation and not just let my fears run the show. I need to take a step away from the thing I’m afraid of, look at it with a discerning eye and see it for what it really is. And if I keep working on this, maybe someday I can fly on a plane sitting next to a mouse with a snake for a seat belt and a zombie for a stewardess. Come to think of it, that is something I’d really like to see up close.